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SkyeAuroline posted:Some games do this. Band of Blades in particular comes to mind, having relatively recently played it, for segmenting out all of the "player-faction" stuff into individual roles for individual players to take up (instead of the GM tracking Absolutely Everything about the Legion the players are a part of, one handles time, world map movement, missions, and part of intelligence; one handles the actual makeup of squads & keeps all the playbooks between missions since characters are shared, and tracks morale; one tracks supplies, personnel, and materiel & their use; one optionally tracks casualties, mission details & results, and handles Legion backstory-building; one optionally tracks the Legion's intelligence network which isn't really a GM role but is the main "players receive world information" method). Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know.
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Jan 5, 2021 05:21
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Thanks, that's great! So one game I'm working on (backburnered right now because I'm playtesting a different thing) is literally XCOM but an RPG. So... I'm just going to try summarize the thoughts I got out of your post and the linked blog post, and let me know if I'm on the right track. One thing going on is that BitD puts a LOT into each roll, and in particular a lot on the GM. And so yeah, doing 20 Devil's bargains per session is exhausting, and so on. Putting that much focus on the tactical aspects was not really what the design was intended for. But if you take some of that structure and put it around a game actually designed around having lots of tactical fights and chases and stuff (like, say, Strike!), it might work better. So if I were to do that, what lessons do I see here? 1) Don't be stingy with downtime. Downtime helps players with embodiment and actually getting to RP their character if they didn't get much opportunity for that in the missions. Since downtime is also recovery, being stingy here also feels really bad when you spend your only chance to do fun RP stuff just getting your character working again. (I had already noticed this issue in Mouse Guard - when you have players who aren't as into earning checks as Luke Crane's players, or a GM that calls for fewer rolls and thus fewer chances to earn checks, then the fun players' turn becomes rote recovery.) 2) Even before reading BoB, I had tentatively written a rule in my notes doc saying you can't play the same soldier in consecutive missions, because soldiers die and you are not to get attached. This rule would be no big deal for me personally, but if I'm thinking about player types (and I should be), that is too alienating. I should aim for a tad less lethality and give players more of a chance to get attached since that's like one of the big draws to RPGs for some players. 3) The metagame roles like commander are too abstracted? Too much paperwork? The funny thing is that I actually have metagame roles in Strike! They're in the section where I write up how to adapt the Black Company novels to the game. So either the designers read Strike! and were inspired a bit, or they happened to hit on the same idea for adapting the same source. (It's a fairly obvious idea, given the source.) But my version was not at all paperworky - it was about each player contributing something useful to the group's social dynamic. One player would take notes and give recaps to start the session, another would be in charge of drawing maps and diagrams for the group to use, one would cut things short when they got bogged down in discussing what to do, another would smooth over any bickering, etc. (p. 184 if you've got Strike! handy). I have some ideas for how I might make them even more fun, but having them be more paperwork and less connected to the characters is not one of those ideas, so I feel like I am on a good track here anyway. So my big question is, assuming you wanted a game with low-to-moderate amounts of RP between proper tactical missions, what parts of the between-missions structure worked really well and what didn't?
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Jan 5, 2021 08:13
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Joe Slowboat posted:Personally I found the point about how the distributed-GM roles actually don't function very salient, regardless of genre or style preference. Yeah, absolutely. And for me also the part about downtime being too stingy. Like, it's emulating a series where the characters actually get a lot of downtime. Croaker is always working on his annals, the Wizards are loading up every spell they can onto a ballista bolt to attempt to maim or kill a Taken, etc. It's soldiering - you spend most of your time waiting around when you're not marching. And how many chapters of the book are about what you'd call missions vs what you'd call downtime? I think not that many, but it has been a while since I read them. But even if that wasn't true, if you're being so stingy with downtime actions that all people can do is recover, then you might as well not have downtime rules and just put in plain recovery rules instead.
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Jan 6, 2021 05:56
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Hey chat thread, I'm writing some wizardy stuff involving divination and in particular prophecy. This is fairly in-depth, so there's going to be tarot stuff and crystal ball stuff and mystical trance stuff as different modalities of prophecy. But I'm hoping to learn from the successes and failures of those who went before me, so can anyone point to any detailed rules for prophecy from other games and even better, info about how they worked well or poorly? I found a free Dungeon World playbook called the prophet, but the rules there are basically that the GM has to do all the hard work of coming up with something. The player gets to pick if it's got a lie in it, or if it's something they don't want to hear and can't repeat, or if they take psychic damage from it. That leaves so much for the GM! If I was a GM, I'd hope that the player used that move sparingly because it's so much mental effort deciding exactly how much of the mystery to reveal, especially if it keeps being used. I have my own priorities: I want the moves/rules to really support the GM. I want it to be useable in a mystery without completely solving things. I want the more difficult modalities to be able to do some things the easier ones can't do, but without completely superceding them. Ideally I want it to be self-limiting, giving a reason why you won't just deal out tarot cards over and over looking for more info, or say "well the cards were vague so I'm going to look in the crystal ball and ask the same question." Any examples good or bad of how to run player prophets would be greatly appreciated!
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Jan 7, 2021 18:24
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aldantefax posted:
Thanks for the suggestions! I'm trying to make something that is kind of Harry Potter-ish but with no TERF shitlib JK Rowling crap. And part of making it gameable is having distinct types of magic available that are roughly equal in ability to contribute, so that's a fun thing. Also having magic be open-ended but also have enough details on the rules to put bounds on what the players can and can't do, what is in theme and what is not." There's always the gamer thing of "Well I know transfiguration, right? I'll just transfigure this baseball into nitroglycerine." or whatever not-in-theme idea. Anyway, divination is one of the main types of magic and includes Finding, Scrying, Empathy (mind-reading), Prophecy, and Retrophecy/Apophecy (like prophecy but for the past). So diviner characters have a good chunk of stuff they can do other than make prophecies. And I'll definitely be sharing this - I'll be publishing it, in fact. There's no timeline yet, but I have momentum and this is the closest I've been to getting something published since Strike! So it will get done. (And making public commitments like this is partly to keep me focused on it and not drift off to other projects and dither forever.) I've got ambitious plans for what I want to get done, but I've also got fallback plans in case the ambitious stuff is too much to achieve or doesn't work in practice. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 22:05
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President is great if you play it with people of equal experience/skill. Going from bum to president in one shot is great fun. Even if you can't, just finishing not-last feels like you're making progress. There's nothing better than making the perfect read on what someone has and playing your cards just so to block them out. Stomping newbies is not much fun, though. Not a good game to play with mixed skill levels. And these days with so many gamesbeing available meaning that people don't stick to one like they used to? It's kind of become just a bad game. But back in the olden times before we all had smartphones, playing President was how we entertained ourselves at lunch in middle school, we played it every day, and so we were all good at it. It's not the only game with that problem. Chess sucks in the same way - playing with newbies feels like a waste of everyone's time.
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Jan 12, 2021 17:31
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Hey, just getting some opinions on a design thing. In Kazzam, there are two magical implements. (Actually there are 3, but the question is about these 2.)quote:If you have a X, your range is 5, and you add 1 damage to your attacks. When you make an attack with your X, you grant an Opportunity to everyone adjacent. Using an attack action with your X ends your turn. So Ys are more versatile and make you more mobile and less vulnerable in melee than Xs, but Xs hit harder. In your opinion, which is a wand and which is a staff? Argument for wand = Y: staves are big and wands are light, so it makes sense that you'd be more mobile with a wand. Argument for staff = Y: staves seem more defensive, so it makes sense that you'd make yourself less vulnerable in melee when using a staff.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:18
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Leraika posted:
There are other mechanics attached to implement choice depending on your class. Sword alchemists smear potions on their blades while staff alchemists hurl flasks of potions lacrosse-style over long distances, etc. Reskinning is absolutely a thing in my games, so if a player wants to play with wand mechanics but say they have a lightweight staff or whatever, that's absolutely fine. But there does need to be a default for ease of use and new players and just to keep the text understandable. Players are choosing to go melee, to go ranged power, or to go for a versatile ranged option that isn't afraid of melee. But unlike Strike, this game does have a default setting and default fluff for everything. So it's important to have some grounding for this choice in the fiction even if people can reskin into whatever. So... which feels like which to you?
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Jan 14, 2021 23:26
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Splicer posted:That's my issue too, none of these feel like one or the other so whatever gets assigned will be essentially arbitrary Yeah, this is kind of the thing that got me and my group talking. If I give the melee defense to the staff and the versatile movement to the wand, then extra damage on either end is not balanced. I might end up shuffling it like that. It's not just about coming up with mechanics that feel wandy and staffy, but also having them be balanced and fun. Having the sport be dynamic and exciting is more important to me than getting a perfect match to the fluff. Like, I'm going for good gameplay, not simulating a magical world with exactitude. The 3rd implement is swords, which are melee only.
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Jan 15, 2021 02:05
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I was just hoping maybe the thread would go like "obviously this one is a wand and that one is a staff, why is there any question?" and settle the argument. Turns out the reason me and my group were unsure is because it's legit ambiguous. Which is fine - that's also an answer I can work with. Consider my question answered.Leraika posted:new players who have a specific concept in mind Leperflesh posted:Coming back to your actual question, if you must assign one set of bonuses/penalties to a flavor of implement, can you lever off of setting elements that aren't the same old tropes? In other words, in your Kazzam setting (is that a setting?) maybe some wizards cast spells via handheld mummified small animals with gems for eyes, and other wizards focus their powers through magic rocks that they have to juggle, while a third set of wizards zap baddies via fragile origami crafts. So I've mentioned this project a couple of times, but haven't yet gone into detail on what it is. So here, I'll go into detail. The game is called either Kazzam or Tailfeathers (not sure which yet). The game is about playing as teenage wizards at a wizarding school, solving mysteries. But also, you play a wizarding sport called kazzam. It's all built on the Strike! chassis. Kazzam works like Strike! combat, but with some extra "sport" elements taken from video games. There is a capture the flag element that lets you score points without having to beat up your opponents and really rewards mobility. There are neutral monsters that are also worth points, so you can "go creeping" like in a MOBA. There is no player elimination - when you get taken out, you go to the dungeon. You can spend a turn leaving the dungeon and rejoining your team, but there's also valuable stuff to do there, so you're really not out of the match even while you're there, and strategically getting yourself sent there could absolutely be a thing to try. Like in Strike!, you choose a Role and a Class, but now you also choose an implement. For some classes, your choice of implement is tied into your choice of class features, while for others it's separate. Implements are wand, staff, and sword. Outside of Kazzam, the mystery plot can be procedurally generated using a plot map like TechNoir's (you don't have to, though - you can bring your own mystery if you prefer). Tailfeathers School is the name of the school the characters attend. You could sum it up as "Harry Potter minus the TERF shitlib BS". But it's not the only school. There is also Fellbarrow Mausoleum, the school of necromancy, and I have plans for more (e.g. Elementalism). Tentatively, the plan is for each school to be a book, and each school/book will have a different set of skills and spells and different Kazzam classes. Tailfeathers teaches students Enchantments and Charms and Divination, but Fellbarrow teaches them Reanimation and Flesh Shaping and Spirit Binding. So the implements at Tailfeathers are tropes because Tailfeathers is the tropes school. "Handheld mummified small animals with gems for eyes" sounds like a great implement for a Fellbarrow student! But like I said, it's totally reskinnable, so if you want to be the goth kid using a mummified parakeet as a wand at Tailfeathers and freaking out the normies, that's awesome and is absolutely encouraged. The schools will be mixable too, so you could be a foreign exchange necromancer from Fellbarrow at Tailfeathers for the year, showing them how your ability to talk to dead things is just as good as any crystal ball. I'm planning that most of the stuff here will be backwards compatible with Strike! Right now, you could take any of the Kazzam classes and reskin them into Strike! and it would be reasonably balanced. It's going great so far. In our last playtest, we managed to get the kazzam rounds moving snappily, and a bunch of fun emergent stuff happened from the sport's rules. The opposing team member the players were most afraid of was the specialist runner who rarely bothered attacking and mostly used her speed to zip around trying to score points. The players pushed a swarm of bats into the opposing team, using creeps as a weapon to great effect. The defender did defendery things (making the GM hate them, somehow not dying), the teleportation wizard used a bunch of forced movement to mess interfere with the enemy's plans, and the hexer/leader hit stuff and did good damage while keeping the team healthy. It's still early playtesting - I don't have levelups for any of the classes yet, but it's really very promising and I'm so excited about it. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 06:21
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aldantefax posted:My dude Lol, yeah, you gave a quick answer, which I appreciate! (and your answer agreed with my own gut feeling, which I also appreciate.) But everyone else came down somewhere between "it's neither here nor there" and "we need more info". Joe Slowboat posted:Given the genre thing it's riffing off, I imagine 'wait isn't this sport incredibly, incredibly unsafe' is more of a positive than a negative. In the setting, the sport is kind of an emulation of real wizard battles. It's like paintball. Paintball is not perfectly safe, but it's safe enough for kids to play with proper eye protection. And if there's an accident, well, they have healing magic anyway. But if the question is whether naughty children could raid the equipment locker and get in real trouble? Yeah, that's absolutely thematic for this sort of thing. Wizard teens get in way over their head. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 08:49
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aldantefax posted:Hmm. Unrelated to the above, but now I'm thinking if I did run a West Marches game, it would have to be in a game engine that allowed for robust creation of a Wizard School where everybody has a gun Use Strike! with the Survival mini-expansion to help with some of the wilds exploration stuff.
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Jan 16, 2021 22:27
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Covok posted:System Mastery poster dudes, you really chose Interstital for your first PbtA on system mastery? That game is not good. I mean, reviewing not good games is what they do most of the time. The good ones stand out all the more for that.
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Jan 21, 2021 06:38
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Trad Games Chat: It's Still Technically Trad Games If We're All Writing Like George R.R. Martin ??? But GRRM doesn't write...
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Jan 27, 2021 21:24
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aldantefax posted:I wonder if there are going to be more Wild West cinematic games coming out in the future? I only really know Deadlands, Boot Hill, Aces & Eights. Well I could let you know, but https://www.isfarwestoutyet.com doesn't seem to exist anymore.
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Jan 30, 2021 01:02
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Leraika posted:Sure, I can give a very brief rundown. Basically, enemies have a hex grid of actions, and they roll a dice each turn to determine what path they take navigating through the hexes. Usually (but not always) the center hex will be movement, and then the hexes surrounding it will be each have either a basic attack or a special ability, and so forth and so on. Each monster also has a note in its stat block that determines what its targeting priorities are (usually they'll attack the nearest hero, but not always for example, a beastmaster foe might target whichever character last targeted one of its minions, teleporty guys might target the farthest away foe, and there's a few mobile foes whose targeting is completely random). Why does it do action A on a 1 or a 5, but basic attack on a 2,3,4, or 6? As opposed to doing A on a 1-2 and basic attack on a 3-6? Is there any significance to that arrangement? Is there any significance to the hex positioning?
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Feb 8, 2021 21:50
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Countblanc posted:Using that specific example if it was "special action on a 1-2" then there'd be a chance the monster could do their special action twice in a row since those hexes would be touching, which the designers may not think is appropriate Ok, I get it now. I had kind of dismissed that possibility because then the monster rarely ever moves, and I was thinking of this like Gloomhaven or D&D where if the monster doesn't move often it's just going to sit there. Like, in Gloomhaven when we draw a monster card that has no movement it's usually a big reprieve because the monsters will just sit there. But obviously in a system where movement is not so important, (or for a monster with long range who doesn't have to care about movement), this is not a big deal. The other thing I didn't consider is that maybe "basic attack" includes movement. In that case, it's the middle square that is essentially a "dead" square, which makes the most sense. I'll check out the website later. It doesn't seem to work properly on mobile (I tried 3 times to get it to download a monster pdf and it wouldn't) and all the computers are in use by my wife&kids doing real work right now.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:21
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I had all these same questions that everyone asking about this game, until I went on the website and looked at the monsters and the whole thing is super clear and pretty intuitive when you see the whole sheet, or even just a more complicated monster's hex grid thingy. I guess this is one of those rare cases where the simplest one was a really bad demonstration. So it is functionally equivalent to a list that goes like (for example) 1: move, basic, A, B 2: move, A, B, C 3: move, basic, A, basic 4: move, A, basic, B 5: move, A, B, basic 6: move, A, D Which means that I'm still wondering a bit about my original question of "is there a reason why they split up the As onto 1 and 5 instead of having them just be 1-2?". I mean, "it just looks better and it makes no difference either way" might totally be the correct answer. Anyway, the combat system seems a bit "lots o' dice and big numbers" to me, but I love the fact that it's GMless (or GM-optional, I guess). Very cool! I've been tossing around ideas for making a GM AI module for Strike! for a while, but haven't yet hit on the right combination of rules to satisfy me. Between this and Ironsworn and other GMless and solo games coming out, I'm always really interested in seeing the ways they solve the difficult problems inherent in the idea.
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Feb 9, 2021 06:36
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:For sure. They do have "learnable abilities" for "veteran" monsters that kind of expand it and occasionally give the GM a choice in combat, but those don't let you cross from one chain into another, they just give you extra options within a chain.
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Feb 9, 2021 07:44
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Leraika posted:All of this is exactly what I said, though? If I didn't explain it well, that's one thing, but saying I'm wrong is another entirely. I never said anything about wrapping around, I specifically said the monster I used for the sake of example was basic, and I explained the way a given turn for a monster worked more clearly in my next post. Sorry, I should have said that SOME of the posts were wrong. Your posts were not wrong, just a little incomplete so some other posters were speculating inaccurately. Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Not like I have the full rules or anything here, but it looks like the Shadeseer could jump from the 2 chain to the 1 chain by going Basic Attack > Move 3 sq > F > F or from the 3 to the 4 chain by going Basic Attack > move 7 sq > F > G > Basic Attack > Move 5 sq. Unless I missed a bit in the free rules that says a learned ability ends the chain or that you're not allowed to move between chains? And I dunno, maybe the intent is that you can't, but in general I think it would be a pretty cool concept for combo moves if you could add specials that jumped between chains. The learned abilities give you more choices for moving along a chain but don't let you jump between chains. So an F might be usable as part of a 1 or a 2, but doesn't let you cross over. You can actually find those rules free, too ("veteran foe rules").
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Feb 9, 2021 14:54
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aldantefax posted:These are all great suggestions. Just for further context I'm in exploration mode for looking at different systems of resource management for wilderness travel and journeying for use in the West Marches / Wild Crawl thread and to see what might be better - crunchiness, granularity, and all that good stuff are good. Check out Strike!'s Survival mini-expansion for some content and subsystems focusing on that sort of stuff.
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Feb 25, 2021 03:34
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Panzeh posted:I find d&d 5e to be bland and inoffensive, i don't think it's too much of a disaster, i just wish it hadn't eaten up most of the streaming boom I think D&D is pretty bad, but who cares abut that. I don't have to like every game, and I know plenty of games I don't like that are made by good people. My problems with WotC come down to 2 things: 1. Mearls, Zak S, etc. 2. They keep doing this cynical cycle where they "hire" (give temporary contracts to, not permanently employ) marginalized designers, make a big deal about it, then treat them like crap and stay quiet when the designers leave in disgust. They count on the fact that they will get more good press for the hiring than bad press for the inevitable parting of ways. Like, I've been quiet about this on Twitter because I don't want to poo poo on anyone's parade, but it baffles me how anyone could look at the press about their upcoming Ravenloft book and take WotC's claims seriously after we saw the same discourse when Orion Black was hired and we know how that turned out. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 22:11
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Turns out connective tissue is pretty much interchangeable. You can just replace them with whatever. When I tore my ACL the doctors were like "hey, you've got this big thick hamstring tendon up here and you don't really need all of it. We'll just slice off a bit and stick it in your knee." It did take a bit more than a day to heal that.
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Mar 8, 2021 08:46
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Gort posted:Really the whole, "This species are mostly traders and merchants" thing is problematic when you think about it. Like the whole "noble warrior race" trope, someone's gotta be doing the farming and crafting, you can't all be warriors unless your society is in a death spiral Having a preponderance of itinerant traders is a natural consequence of bigotry and violence against a group. As is having close-knit communities living together in one part of a city. You would expect to see a lot of people who are able to pack up and go when things look bad, and you would expect the ones who can't pack up and go to live close together for mutual protection. You see those things not just with Jewish communities in Europe, but with other minority ethnic groups as well like the Romani. We have Chinatowns and Little Italy's in nearly every major North American city because of racism. So if you have racism in your setting, those things are just sensible inclusions. Other things are much more historically contingent. Like the Jewish community having a lot of bankers. That came from specific Christian laws in Europe and you would not usually expect your oppressed fantasy ethnic group to have a lot of bankers. Same thing with having fortune tellers and living in wagons - those are specific to a particular group and not common among many or all oppressed minorities. Including details like those will make it seem like you are drawing a direct real-world parallel to a specific group, and you don't want to be doing that with rat people.
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Mar 19, 2021 15:31
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busalover posted:I think a year or two ago someone released an updated version of a 90s RPG about some kind of... cyberpunk island? I read the original source book years ago, and thought it was kinda cool, but forgot its name. Is the new version worth a try, anyone bought it? Sounds like you're talking about Over the Edge? I haven't played either edition so I have no idea how it turned out.
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Mar 27, 2021 14:59
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Infinity Gaia posted:If 2 player competitive card games are of interest, half of Level 99 games ouvre might fit. BattleCON and Exceed for straight up 1v1 fighting card games and Millenium Blades for a fun card game about card games. These are good suggestions. If a board game with cards is acceptable, get Mage Knight. It's very crunchy, but very very good if you like crunch. It's a deck builder with a board map to move around on.
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Apr 8, 2021 14:09
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KingKalamari posted:At the same time, I feel like that's just as much or more of a problem with things like Elves and especially Dwarves. I can probably count the number of Dwarf PCs I've encountered who have a more complex personality than "drunk, rowdy and faux-Scottish" on one hand.
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May 2, 2021 15:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Berserk is good but it's also basically an exhaustive list of content warnings in manga form, so keep that in mind going in. A few years ago I tried to start watching the anime with my wife and we had to turn it off almost instantly. I wish someone had given us those content warnings! Comparing it to dark souls is not really fair. I don't think Dark Souls has a bunch of sexual violence. Berserk does.
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May 22, 2021 21:03
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Coolness Averted posted:There's also a ton of stuff that has sexual and body horror stuff in dark souls and bloodborne, it's just less fetishy about it and goes with evocative imagery and half gleened elements you can fill to be unsettling, rather than "here's a ton of rape" Some people have specific triggers. Having a monster claw its way out of their body is something that has not happened to many women. Sexual assault is unfortunately something that has. So mundane sexual violence is much more likely to require a content warning than over-the-top fantasy horror gore.
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May 23, 2021 18:27
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One reason why it's easier to make games about combat than about arguing is because people don't know poo poo about combat, but we've all been in a bajillion arguments. If I tell you, here are the exactly 8 arguments you can make, and their mechanical effects, you'll be like... but what about this? How does this fit? It's not one of the 8. And this mechanical effect for this argument assumes you're making it in a certain way and... Etc. If I tell you, here are the exactly 8 ways to hit someone with a big sword, you'll be like, cool I've got 8 moves. Unless you're a real deep medieval combat nerd you're not going to be like "but what about half-swording??"
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Jun 2, 2021 01:30
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Hey, so I have a question. If I'm making a sort of template that can be applied to an enemy statblock to modify that enemy, which is better? A) Have one template that covers multiple levels. E.g. one ability might say "On a hit, slide the target 2 squares. (4 squares at level 4.)" Or B) Have 3 or 4 separate versions of the template, one for each relevant level. E.g. the level 1-3 version says "On a hit, slide the target 2 squares." and the level 4-7 version says "On a hit, slide the target 4 squares." Same question for full enemy statblocks - have one statblock that contains powers usable only above level 4? Or have multiple statblocks with much repetition? Having multiple statblocks increases the page count of that section rather significantly. But does the ease of use make up for that? Obviously the best solution is to have an online monster builder that outputs pdfs, but that's beyond my talents and current budget.
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Jun 12, 2021 20:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Create an app to generate individual printable instances from the template. Unless my budget ends up being way higher than it is now, this is not really possible. But yeah, absolutely this would be ideal. And yeah, "both" is maybe possible. I could put the condensed version in the main book but then have a separate PDF designed for printing out that has the multiple split up versions. That wouldn't be free, since it is more layout work, but it wouldn't be that much since it would be pretty simple and minimalist layout to make it optimal for printing or referencing in play.
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Jun 13, 2021 19:55
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I thought the porn metaphor wasn't about the scriptedness so much as it was about the editedness. Some porn is just a continuous shot of the whole event with usually poor audio and video quality, while commercial porn is rigorously edited and has high quality audio and video. Which makes a better metaphor than pro wrestling vs MMA. Neither of those have much editing and cutting - you generally see the whole fight in both. So my question as someone who has not seen CR, is how much do they edit? I know the McElroys edited a lot for their podcast when I listened. They cut out people looking poo poo up, asking about mechanics, misspeaking, dropping dice on the floor, etc.
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Jul 11, 2021 07:38
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Siivola is right. In a binary pass/fail system, the distribution of outcomes is not and cannot be a bell curve. It is always a Bernoulli distribution. That is, X% chance of success and 100%-X% chance of failure for some value of X. All you do when you make your dice have a bell curve in that context is you make the relative effects of bonuses and penalties inconsistent. A +1 bonus means little, then a lot, then little again, depending where on the curve you are. Bell curves from dice pools can do more good work for your design when you have gradations of success and failure or other sorts of non-binary outcomes.
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Jul 16, 2021 06:19
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Halloween Jack posted:If one can design a fun tactical subsystem for "hit people with weapons until they die " one can surely do the same for "escape from this collapsing building" or "stop this plane from crashing" I've said before, part of the issue is that the combat systems we are used to are not actually modelling combat. They are modelling video game combats where you have special moves and poo poo. So I can use sweeping strike or stunning strike depending on the tactical situation, or I can go into my Solid Turtle Stance. That's how it works in RPGs because that's how it works in video games. That's absolutely not how it works in a real fight. 99%+ of us have not been in a real fight with weapons, but we've all been in arguments and negotiations, nearly every day. You can design any number of things this way, but the issue is getting players on board. In this system for escaping burning buildings, you can use your Spinning Fire-Toss to move 1 adjacent square of fire 3 squares, or you can use your Tumbling Stair technique to descend one level through a burning staircase without catching fire. You can't just keep doing that, though - it's an encounter power! Next time you encounter a burning staircase you'll have to do something else. In this system for debating, you can use your Steely Stare power to increase their credence to your argument by 6 points, or you can attempt to lower their composure with your Dismissive Laughter power. But then someone goes and minmaxes and tries to win every argument by just laughing for 5 minutes straight and then making one good point at the end, not because it's the most effective, but just because they think it'd be fun. Basically, every abstraction that would stretch the bounds of credibility in a tactical combat system is something that video games have already inured us to. They don't chafe anymore, the grooves have worn smooth. With non-combat stuff you're having to carve new grooves. Doubly so for experienced roleplayers who think they already know how debating is supposed to work in an RPG.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:10
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It seems like there is no way out. If you make the "savages" actually inhuman and without agency, you have basically just made a game that says "what if the colonizers were right?" If you make the land truly empty, same thing. "Manifest destiny but correct." If you just make a game that is real and honest about what went on, it will upset a lot of people that you are playing if not explicitly racist characters, then at best ones who are directly contributing towards explicitly racist goals. If you make a game about playing as the indigenous people resisting the colonizers, that could be fantastic, and it could be in the old west, but I don't know if it would actually be properly "a western." You can ignore it all and just have a game of rootin tootin pistols at dawn yeehaw, but that approach has already been called "abhorrent" in this thread. It really seems like a "pick your poison" type of situation. You won't get everyone on board no matter what you do. If you're playing cowboys, then either you're playing as colonizers who bear some complicity in atrocity or you're playing a game that erases atrocity to some extent.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:15
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Can anyone think of any cool RPGs or supplements (or maybe other things?) about being a magic-user and establishing your own Wizard Tower/Sanctum/Workshop? Ironsworn just had a cool 3rd-party supplement put out to that effect and I'm thinking of giving it a go but also looking for some additional inspiration material perhaps. It lists Ars Magica as primary inspiration but I'm wondering if there is anything else cool/good out there. The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions by Vincent Baker is relevant, I think.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:39
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I wonder what class/role combo Aloy will play.KingKalamari posted:While funny, the fact that they're making and selling physical copies of this is kind of legitimately bad news for jimbozig from a business/SEO perspective as this game is going to dominate results for Strike-related searches in a tabletopcontext. Hah, yeah, but Strike has been dogshit for SEO from the start. You can google "Strike RPG" and get my page at the top, but try searching for it on Drivethru - it's not good!
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Sep 4, 2021 03:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Serious question: replace ability scores with what? Just skills? Splicer posted:Specifically in the case of D&D 5E? Skills and class choices. In 5e you pick a race a class a background and an archetype, that's a huge range of interactions to determine your to-hit, damage, saves, AC, initiative, and very good/good/OK/bad skills. Ability scores actually interfere with this. I've picked a warlock with the academic background and chosen arcana as a proficient skill, why do I also need to put points into intelligence to get my +5 to Know Demon Stuff? I've already picked Know Demon Stuff three times! Just skills works great for Strike! But when you make a system that has more built-in flavor like D&D, you add to this. Your class can give you abilities and powers that are flavorful and well-suited to your class, and interact with the core Skills system in a variety of ways. Same with something like what D&D calls race. If you still want more, throw in some other minor choices that serve to focus one or two aspects of your character, like background or whatever.
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Sep 26, 2021 04:34
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Haystack posted:So, I'm looking for GMless two-player RPGs that are more on the upbeat side. Doesn't have to be sunshine and unicorns, but nothing depressing. Any suggestions? I think I've got the perfect thing for you. As part of getting over writer's block I managed to trick myself into working on a little game whenever my brain wouldn't let me work on the big game I'm writing. It's now just about ready to publish. It's called Ariadne and Bob, and it's about a know-it-all and her sidekick. It's designed for 2 players, with options for adding in a third or fourth. It has several playsets to choose from setting-wise: fantasy, sci-fi, horror movies (but the game is pretty funny so it tends to horror-comedy), high society (think Jeeves and Wooster), and one for traveling through history or fiction (like Mr. Peabody and Sherman). I've played it several times now and it's a lot of fun. If you're interested, I'll PM you a link to the doc.
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Oct 6, 2021 16:46
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